Boy, it sure is a good thing that Sweden’s Carl Bildt rushed to be the first foreign minister to visit a newly “independent” Kosovo three weeks after the secession.

Then again, the poor man is terrified. Like the rest of the Western world, he was hoping that doing everything the Albanians wanted with Serbia would help assuage the many Albanian “refugees” that all these countries took in. The U.S. was hoping for the same thing ( ‘If we just keep feeding them Serbs, maybe they’ll leave us alone’). But then the plot against Ft. Dix was discovered, not to mention this more recent stuff. Oh well. It was a worth a try. Wasn’t it?

Two men, aged 19 and 21, have been arrested in connection with an arson attack at the home in southern Sweden of artist Lars Vilks.

The 21-year-old was arrested late on Saturday at his home in Landskrona, 40 kilometres from the house where Vilks lives. He is being held on suspicion of aggravated attempted arson.

A police spokesman said he was detained after personal items were found near Vilks’ house in the village of Nyhamnsläge, which was slightly damaged in the attack overnight Friday.

“He is of Swedish nationality but originally from Kosovo … He was unknown to the police so far,” Scania district police spokesman Calle Pärsson told AFP.

The suspect whose name was not made public “is still being detained and expected to see a judge to decide whether or not he will be charged, possibly tomorrow” (Monday), said Pärsson. […]

Say, wait a second. Weren’t we told that Albanians were the non-Muslimy kind of Muslims? Why is this guy all up in the Islam? Then again, if an Albanian is involved, surely the attack against the Muhammad cartoonist has nothing to do with Islam at all. That’s what was being hammered into us when that Bosnian kid killed five Americans in Salt Lake City’s Trolley Square for Valentine’s Day 2007. So perhaps there are “special circumstances” here too. After all, just think of all the “Serbian atrocities” the arsonist might have witnessed as a young boy during the Kosovo war, which could have affected him negatively. (This is called the “Blame the Serbs” defense, and it’s almost guaranteed be coming to a newspaper near you.)

No, this person is not representative of most Albanians. But he is representative of more Albanians than Serbs. So remind me why we supported the former against the latter?

According to comment poster Froken Sverige, the name of our latest Albanian Islamist is Alija Mentor, born 1989.

“In October 2006, [a special investigator for the UN Mission in Kosovo] pointed to a case from a couple of years earlier, in which UNMIK police arrested several Islamic extremists plotting terror in a village near Mitrovica: ‘They were all Albanians, and all of them hadBritishpassports,’ said the investigator. ‘Some were related to leading officials in the Kosovo government. It was all hushed up and never reported in the media.’ Other intelligence sources have drawn a connection between this group, civil administration appointees, and arrests made by the British government in the July 2005 bomb plots in London.”

We also learn of a murky and as yet unreported incident in which six Albanian-American fundamentalists arrived in the village of Skenderaj in the weeks before 9/11. Says Gambill — who in 2005 blew the whistle on the Kosovo mission in an interview with Cybercast News Service — the men had “spread anti-American slogans and stated, one week before 9/11, that the US would soon be attacked.”

“According to Gambill, the radicals were ‘linked to a wealthy Mafioso in Mitrovica’ — a shock admission linking Islamic radicals and the Albanian mafia. More shocking, however, was the utter disinterest with which UN authorities greeted this apparent ’smoking gun’ case. While investigators elsewhere were racing furiously to track down anyone and everyone with foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, the CivPol [UN police] officer who identified the agitators, according to Gambill, ‘was frustrated that no one above him [in rank] was interested, and no one above him really pushed [for this investigation] — there was little said about it — and no follow-up.’”